Sim Reaney, Durham University
The use of landscape based natural flood risk management approaches have risen in popularity in recent years as they have the potential to offer mitigation to flood hazards at a lower costs and other multiple benefits, such as habitat improvements. However, the location of the mitigation measure within the landscape can have a significant effect on the downstream impacted location, such as a town or city. Therefore there is a need for a rapid tool to identify suitable locations for more detailed study. This presentation will cover the prototype version of SCIMAP-Flood to give a risk based mapping of likely locations that are contributing to the flood peak. This tool uses information on land cover, hydrological connectivity, a set of different flood generating rainfall patterns and hydrological travel time distributions to a set of different impacted communities. This dataset is combined to give a risk based approach to the locating of flood peak source areas at both the wider landscape scale and the sub-field field. This risk mapping approach has been applied at a 5m grid resolution for the River Eden catchment (2,300 km2) and the initial results will be presented. SCIMAP-Flood can identify sub-catchments where physically based catchment hydrological simulation models can be applied to test the effectiveness of different NFM based mitigation measures or where there is overlap with other diffuse pressures, such as fine sediment, to spatially target mitigation features to reduce flood risk and sediment at the same time.